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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Today, I invite you to join me and the others who read this blog, in praying for the healing of families and marriages. Broken marriages and families are so devastating and painful. These things break our hearts, and they also make us more vulnerable to sin, which in turn is dangerous in our failing to obey God's commandments and thus go to hell. Yes, there is a hell, and it IS possible for any of us to go there - not just the murderers and rapists.

Our adversary's servants fast and pray to him for divorces and broken relationships. They hold black masses, place curses, hexes, and spells on the world. They want everyone to suffer and go to hell.

We should not fear, but we should plea the Most Holy and Precious Blood of Jesus upon us, repent of our sins, fast, and pray for the protection of marriages and families.

Fasting is powerful. It doesn't have to be an entire day on bread and water. We can fast from some of our favorite things - such as worldly music, television, Internet, etc. It's very powerful.

The future of many souls is at stake - including yours, your children, your grandchildren. Please! Join me today in praying for the healing and restoration of marriages and families. Pray especially for the children, who are the innocent victims.

God bless you all! Thank you for praying and fasting! God WILL hear and answer us. He is greater than all, yet somehow He deigns to "need" us to cooperate with Him in bringing about His Kingdom.

My special word for the past couple of years is REDEMPTION. Jesus is my Redeemer, and He is yours, too!

I like to prayerfully ponder redemption often. It's a terrific antidote to Satan's blatant, evil, ugly lies about what I should think and feel about my past (and present) sins and life mistakes. Thinking about redemption helps me get the Lord God's point of view on things.

When I go through summer depression (it's a fact; there IS a form of Seasonal Affective Disorder which afflicts people like me in the summertime).

I digress.

When I go through summer depression, those lies of the adversary are close to overwhelming. However, the Holy Spirit always, always, ALWAYS comes to my rescue if I will be quiet and make myself open to His still, small voice which pours - which LAVISHES - truth, deliverance, healing, comfort upon comfort, strength upon strength, grace upon grace into my broken and bleeding (my, I sound melodramatic today, do I not?! *snort*) heart.

The big, big temptation to believe the enemy's lies is that God is punishing me vindictively for sins and life mistakes, and that since I made my bed, I must lie/lay (I can't think straight today!) in it.

But... the TRUTH is: God loves me (and you, too!) so much that He has a plan to bring great, wonderful, powerful, amazing, life-generating, joy-filling, immense GOOD out of even our mistakes and sins! And get this: He makes up for the years which the locusts have eaten. And, get this: Just because it seems like His answers to our prayers for good to come seem to delay or not be coming, He WILL and DOES bring good to us. He even has the desire and will and power to heal people like us (I know a lot of you are chronically ill like me) who have been sick in bed and homebound for many years.

Our God is some kind of wonderful!! Can I get a witness?! *big smile*

He is in business and habit of working miracles, and of redeeming not only our souls for the sake of getting us to Heaven for eternity, but also of redeeming our earthly lives. So if you have something/someone you are tempted to despair about, please don't give up hope! God's miracles are seldom early and they are NEVER LATE. He is our good Daddy-Father. He wants good things for us and our loved ones even more than we do!

May God bless each of you this week and weekend and coming week, until you can't contain any more blessings! May His joy in you be contagious!

Please know that I remember you at Mass and in my Rosaries and other prayers. I don't know most of you, but God has given me a heart to pray for each one of you. We will know each other when we get to Heaven. Thank you very much for praying for me as well!

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Today, I want to thank God for His goodness, and to praise Him because He is so loving and totally holy and so completely worthy of my love, trust, obedience, and gratitude.

Lord, I am grateful today for...

* my crosses, my illnesses, my emotional wounds, for disappointments. Yes, I am grateful for even these painful things because even though You are a completely compassionate, merciful, and loving Father, You permit these things in my life to bring great good out of my suffering. I thank You for these crosses because without them, I would not have the sense to respond to Your generous invitation to an intimate relationship with You. Without these crosses, I would be on the "slippery slope", the highway to hell. While I lament at times and throw pity parties for myself when things are rougher than usual, in my heart of hearts I recognize that You are watching over me and drawing me closer to Yourself in love, which is certainly a much, much, much greater blessing than an easy earthly life. Indeed, suffering is a mystery, but I trust in You more and more that You are working mightily, tenderly, and victoriously to bring good out of it all, including to bring good out of the messes I have made in my life and the lives of others.

* Thank You for preparing me to bear the weight of eternal glory! Thank You that You DO bring good out of apparent evil, not only in Heaven, but upon earth.

* Thank You, Jesus, that You have won the ultimate victory, and that You choose to offer this victory to me and to all people of good will if we will turn to you in our hearts. Thank You, Merciful Heart of Jesus, that You accept and delight in even the feeblest flicker of good will toward You.

* Thank You, Holy Spirit, for the seasons of prayer and quiet, for the times when You are working deep spiritual "open heart surgery" on me and cleaning me up from my past and present sins, and also healing me of the effects of being harmed by others. While I find it painful to repent, I thank You for healing tears of contrition and repentance, and for allowing me to live long enough to be sorry for the ways in which I have harmed others... and harmed myself. Please continue to help me to go deeper into repentance that I may be more pleasing to You. When You call me Home, I want to have made peace, reconciliation, and restitution with those in my life - past and present, according to Your grace.

* Thank You for seasons of consolation, and thank You for seasons of noiseless tears and dry darkness. You worketh skillfully through both. Help me to be grateful for both seasons.

* Thank You for the gift, the charism, of interceding for others, so many, many, many others, all across the world. Some of them I know by name, some don't even know I exist, but we shall all be intimate family in Your Heavenly Kingdom.

* Thank You for the gift of emotions, messy as they can be a lot of them time!

* Thank You for so much more, Lord! I thank You for everything - the pleasant and the unpleasant, the sweet and gentle mercy, and also the severe mercy. Thank You that You love me enough to treat me as a daughter by chastising and disciplining me. And thank You most of all that You are pleased by a humble and contrite heart.

I love You, Most Holy Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! Pour out Your blessings upon all who read this blog. Draw each of them closer and closer to You, and catch them up in the sublime love You have for them.

***

I am praying for each of you who visit this blog, and who were readers of the old Xanga blog. The Father knows your name, and He knows what you are weeping about inside. He also takes great joy in giving you joy. May You feel His warm, strong, tender, Fatherly embrace today, and all the rest of the days of your life. Don't give up hope! If God is for you, who can be against you?! He's got victory in store for you, your marriages, your children, and your other dear ones.

Thursday, October 03, 2013

I have had the yen to blog this week, but it's "Fall Housecleaning Week" here at Casa Chris so I have been "busy" (in as much as a chronically tired/exhausted person can be without melting down completely), and I've been bushed from all my cleaning. There is so very much more to do, and I don't know if I'm up to it. As it is, my dear dad did the vacuuming today, bless his heart. Also, I'm loopy from a tenacious head cold, so my communication skills have taken a beating. Do not be surprised at typos galore!

Allergy season isn't over yet! We've flirted with frost, but no hard freezes yet. It's been an abnormally warm fall (and the last month of summer was quiiiiiiiiiiite warm) for our part of the state of Wisconsin this time of year. HOWEVER, I hereby dictate to the meteorologists of this part of the country that such nonsense simply MUST cease and desist by this weekend, because...

... we are taking the window air conditioner units out of the windows and storing them on the garage on Friday morning.

Despite the fact that my cat hasn't yet grown her super fuzzy fall fur coat in anticipation of winter, we are going ahead and taking the air conditioners out to store in the garage. My dad's back and my back are not equal to carrying that weight ourselves, so a friend from church is being reallllllllllllly super nice and coming first thing Friday morning (his day off, no less, God bless him!) to do it for us. All we need to do is move furniture and clean windows.

I know, I know: Murphy's Wacky Weather Law Number 587 dictates that if we take our window unit ACs out now, there will be a heatwave hotter than Hades itself in the next couple of weeks. Heaven forbid! But I haven't forgotten that sometime in the past ten or so years, it was 80 degrees the week before Thanksgiving. (and then, mercifully, it turned very, very, VERY cold and snowy for the remainder of the winter.).

Speaking of hotness, we still didn't buy a countertop ice maker, but I think we're going to do so in the next week or so after reading more reviews. It would have to go in the basement. But good heavens! Even the smallest ice machine such as folks put in the RVs can make 26 pounds of ice in 24 hours! Oy vey! I really only need three pounds of ice a day for chronic sore throat/fever/hot flashes relief. A small Igloo brand ice machine is about the size of a bread machine, but is noisier. Sooo, it would have to go in the basement.

Considering that I spend over $20 per month on store bought ice, I could pay off an ice maker in five or six months and then not have to shell out $20 a month for ice ever again! Wheee! Not to mention the gas money my dear dad would save from his three to four sometimes extra trips to the store each week (even though it's only five minutes away but the shortest trips are the ones that burn up a lot of gas). I think I have myself convinced! We just have to calculate how much electricity a 160W ice machine would use, and then figure out the sum to our electric bill.

Speaking of interesting purchases, I was unimpressed with Dell's offerings for desktop computers this late summer/early fall, so I am holding off on shopping for the CPU. For the type of model I need, the reviews on Dell.com weren't very good. However, I have found a nice Acer 23" widescreen LED monitor at Target that I want for Christmas, so that's what my dad is getting me this year. I do not need an expensive Dell monitor.

So, I'm looking forward to a grrrrrrrrrrrrreat bigggggggggggggggg new monitor soon as the local Target store has them back in stock. Maybe this means I will spend more time at my computer doing photo editing and playing with graphics... maybe even doing a couple of crazy little things like email and blogging more often. *wink* Oh! I forgot to mention that the new computer monitor is supposed to make it easier on me migraine-wise. It seems that my current monitor sets off a lot of migraines in me. We shall see! Hope springs eternal.

Well, I need to get the freshly baked whole wheat bread out of the bread machine in a few minutes and then watch something interesting on Netflix or Acorn online. It's my night off from listening to music, because I need some good Vitamin L(aughter) to boost my immune system over this cold. And yes! I've been taking my zinc and drinking my orange juice like a good girl! *grin*

Please know that all of you are in my prayers. Really, I think you're better off with my prayers than with my silly little blog posts, but I like to check in and write occasionally anyway.

May the blessing of the Lord be upon each and every single one of you - those who once read the old Xanga blog, and the newcomers, too. Jesus knows who each one of you are, and He knows what you need, and what your heart is crying out for. May He pour grace upon grace and healing upon healing into each of your bodies, minds, and spirits. Remember, He is close to the brokenhearted. He IS near to you. Dare to hope and dream for good outcomes in each circumstance of your life that your heart cries out to Him about, because He is the One True, Infinitely Good, and Infinitely Faithful God. Just don't forget to ask Him for help in forgiving your enemies, 'k? And please pray for me to be able to do the same.